i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

this was WAY better than last week's episode; great pacing, interesting non-urban-legend-based ghoulie, and plenty of inappropriate brother looks. mmmmmm, brothers.

not much to say, but i have to admit that my favorite moment of the whole episode was when dean wiped the sulfur on the back of sam's suit coat. n'awwwwwwwww. such a big brother thing to do. i laughed out loud at that bit.

who wants to come over and watch next week's episode with me? that dark room-say the name in the mirror-type urban legend has always creeped the shit out of me, and i'm afraid i won't be able to go in my bathroom afterwards. so. anybody?


a couple of months ago, i was talking about how i wanted to integrate my flickr tags with my livejournal tags with my tags on audioscrobbler¹, etc - and there's no way to do that at the moment, or at least i thought there wasn't. except that technorati has done it. it pulls tags from flickr, buzznet, del.icio.us and furl, plus any blogger's site who's enabled tags in the right fashion, and it's all there. on one page. under one tag.

people, this is so fucking amazing i can't even. it's a MINIMAL INDEX OF THE INTERNET. it's still a random and unfiltered and uncatalogued index of the internet, but it is the skeleton of a classified internet. do you guys understand how fucking COOL this is? the interface is still sluggish and messy, clogged with text ads in annoying places and sort of unintuitive, but it's a BACKBONE. it's a backbone for something really fascinating, something really innovative, something we have never seen work before. it's an internet with a fucking card catalogue.

(i'm not particularly wild about the aesthetic implementation of technorati tags on blog pages - it seems clunky and, frankly, really fucking ugly, but the idea is what matters. the idea is what counts.)

back in the day when i first got online - late '95 or so - the people i spent the most time reading on the web were people like maggy donea, derek powazek, lance arthur. i was later lucky enough to fall in with ben brown and his flabjab crew for a while, back when ben was still a compsci student at the unversity of maryland, and i watched ben, derek, alexis allen, magdalen powers - i watched them explode the internet with the so-called "new media".

and the thing is that new media was sort of. it was not the cutting edge then that maybe we thought it was, except that all these people are still doing all these neat things, and they ARE on the cutting edge now. consumating, ben's wacky-brilliant new dating site. technorati, where derek works. and still and always the beautiful narrative storytelling of fray, which is probably the first site on the internet i really loved.

i'm not in touch with any of the people from back then anymore, except for zannah and dotgirl, but i still watch them from afar with a healthy mixture of awe, respect, and cynicism. the fact of the matter is that i have been lucky all my life to surround myself with crazy creative genius-type people, and then and now are no different - i'm still surrounded by crazy creative genius-type people. but the fact of the matter is that people i knew, however tangentially, once upon a time, are doing crazy cool things with the internet and its resources, just like they were doing almost ten years ago. so. that's pretty fucking cool.

and did i mention the internet card catalogue?

that said, i have some more reading about natural language processing to do. and then i have to go to class.

(for the record and unrelated to this: my favorite piece of writing re: blogs ever published. in case you cared.)

1: also for the record, i found that entry of mine BY USING MY TAGS. hooray.